


The One That Hits You

by MercuryGray



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Injury Recovery, Nurses & Nursing, Women in the Military, pacific theatre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26718262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: They said the only bullet you don’t hear is the one that hits you - and Andrew Haldane didn’t much believe that until one did.He should have known there was something lurking in the quiet, but that’s the thing about battle, isn’t it, that you bottle the thinking mind up until the only thing you focus on is the objective, the thing right in front of you. And then, that was how it happened - the bullets that hit him, the bullets that wanted him dead.Shot, but certainly not dead, Andrew Haldane is recuperating in Hawaii.
Relationships: Andrew A. "Ack-Ack" Haldane/Original Female Character
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	1. Chapter 1

_October 1944, Peleliu Airfield, Palau Islands_

They said the only bullet you don’t hear is the one that hits you - and Andrew Haldane didn’t much believe that until one did.

He should have known there was something lurking in the quiet, but that’s the thing about battle, isn’t it, that you bottle the thinking mind up until the only thing you focus on is the objective, the thing right in front of you, letting the what-ifs sit by the roadside behind you and smoke their Raleighs. Hardly useful to anyone, trading in speculations - either it’s happening, or it isn’t.

And then, that was how it happened - the bullets that hit him, the bullets that wanted him dead. Turned out they were all right, all those old salts - he didn’t hear them, not even in the quiet. Just felt them knock the wind out of him, send him backwards into the dirt, the heat and pain hitting a minute later like a typhoon through his body. And for a minute - an hour? a day? - everything was dark. 

He remembered snatches of things - Burgin yelling, Sledge yelling, so much yelling, the scrabbling of rough-out boots over broken ground, _We’ve got you sir, we’ve got you, easy now - YOU WATCH THAT HOLE, YOU GODDAMN IDIOT, YOU KNOW WHO YOU GOT HERE._ And the same voice, infinitely gentle, _you cold, Skipper, someone got this blanket for you, thought you might be cold, we got you, Skipper, gonna fix you right up._

For men who’ve spent the last months of their lives turning into some of the hardest, roughest, toughest sons of bitches in the Pacific, there was a softness in them sometimes that surprised him - the willingness to forgo all comfort for their friends. The feeling of the wool against his face was like coming home. 

When he woke up, the wool was gone, a cotton hospital sheet in its place, the silence replaced by the low hum of Navy engines. He was out of it, by some miracle he couldn’t name, the deliverance that every soldier simultaneously scorned and hoped for, and all he could think was _God, I left my boys. I left them there._

Not that he’d be much use to anyone at the moment - the doctors told him they’ve basically rerouted all his internal plumbing. It was the damn blanket that saved him, kept everything packed in until someone with more training than your average corpsman could take a look. Now he was on a strictly liquid diet while everything healed up, not much good for anything more than returning salutes and talking to newspaper reporters. 

He’d talked to _so many_ newspaper reporters. 

They’d said you don’t feel it, when the bullet hits, that the feeling only surfaced afterwards, when your body finally got a chance to understand what was going on, to take stock. He’d thought it was the voice he was hearing that knocked the wind out of him, but it turned out it was something else, a different kind of bullet.

He’d been wrapped up in his book, half-wishing someone had shipped him his trunk from Peleliu so he could finish the one he’d been reading, but he supposed that was a lost cause, his personals. No one bothered much with packing up the lives of half-dead men, and he’d been told more than once he was lucky to have even made it to the ship alive, let alone the hospital. He was reading, and then there’d been this woman who sounded so much like home he couldn’t help but look up and stare.

She was a thin, birdlike slip of a thing, hair tucked neatly under her Nightingale cap. Reassigned, he thought - her face was new to him, and he’d been here quite a while. But, oh, god in heaven, her voice. Hearing her joke with the guy a few beds down about changing his dressings and he was right back home, waiting for a bus and listening to some old timer talk about _tha shawp dawn by tha hawba._ Manners be damned, he was still staring when she made her way to the end of his bed to check his chart. Home. A place he’d quite forgotten existed.

“Anything I can get you, Captain?” She asked, responding to his stare with practiced professionalism.

“Box scores for the Red Sox, if you’ve got ‘em.” She looked up at him in surprise, and he immediately felt like the world’s biggest idiot. “Your voice - sounds like home, is all.”

She softened, considerably. “And where’s that for you?”

“Methuen.”

It was like a cloud had passed by her face - she was smiling, now, really smiling, and she stepped closer to the bed, invested now beyond the usual bounds of nurse and patient. “Southbridge - we’re practically neighbors. Vivien Arsenault.” She pronounced it with the soft flourish on the end, _ar-sen-no,_ and his heart did a little flip, remembering so many girls at home with the same Frenchified Quebecois lilt they picked up from speaking French at home and English at school.

“Andy Haldane.” He held a hand for her to shake, almost immediately feeling foolish. She was his nurse, for chrissakes. But she didn’t seem to mind - she smiled and shook his hand. Her hands were thin, and he was almost afraid he’d break something - but then, a couple of months in a hospital bed hadn’t done wonders for his fitness, either. He probably looked awful.

They fumbled through the rest of her checks, his IV, his blood pressure, his pulse, and finally she moved on to the next ward, but something in him couldn’t stop staring. “I’ll let you know about those scores,” she promised, rising from his bedside and making a final note on his chart. “Next letter home.”

He watched her go, and realized there was an ache in his chest where there hadn’t been one before, for baked beans and fall colors, walks along the Merrimack in the cool of an October afternoon, and the feeling of a girl’s woolen scarf as you pulled her in for a kiss.


	2. Chapter 2

_March 1945, Tripler Army Hospital, Hawaii._

In a battle, a soldier must watch the line. He needs to know his enemy - when he sleeps, when he drinks, when he goes to take a piss, what type of gun he uses, and how long since he last fired it, and whether the barrel being cool or hot means an accuracy of fire. A captain must watch his men. He needs to know his soldiers, who’s not eating and who’s limping and who needs new boots and who just got a letter from home that he will need to cry over later alone. They wouldn’t ever ask for help themselves, too afraid to be seen as weak or to be perceived as letting the squad down, and so the help has to come in the form of an offer, subtly given, take this, wasn’t reading it anyway, found it somewhere.

Having neither soldiers nor enemy to mind, Andrew Haldane watched the ward. It was his way of feeling useful, of contributing to the whole. They were not his soldiers, not entirely, but he knew them now just as if they had been.

He knew what time Boone would wake up from a nightmare, and that Hines’ wife had just had a baby he was terrified to meet, that Parrish’s wife was probably sleeping with someone else and was working around to telling him, and the poor guy had no idea. He knew that Lieutenant Calederon’s fiancé was expected any day now, that Doctor Larsen was just about done with the war, that Captain Hickman had started drinking, just a little, to take the edge off her shift. (He wasn’t a snitch, but he told Larsen about Hickman, after he watched her hands shake changing a dressing; the Doctor looked as surprised as anyone.)

Vivienne Arsenault defied being watched. She had something of the phantom about her, a way of coming and going unseen. Quiet, too, not like Lieutenant Calderon, who was bold and brassy and free in the way that some men needed in order to feel well, to feel whole again, to remind them that there was a life after this, after bedpans and red bathrobes and someone changing your bandages. But Calderon had that fiancé, that guy that kept her just outside of reach, and Arsenault had…secrets.

One afternoon she surprised him with a delivery. “Heard you were looking for box scores.” She handed him an entire folder of the last four years of baseball stats, painstakingly typed on Boston Globe stationary. 

“Do you have a boyfriend on the sports page?” he asked, flipping through the folder and feeling impressed. He’d hoped for an old newspaper clipping or two- this was a lot of work. There was a note that had gotten shuffled in with the rest: _“Viv - got these for your patient. Let us know if you need anything else. Always happy to help one of our Angels.”_

She pulled the note out when she saw it, crumpling it in her hand. “They just like me there, is all,” she said with a vacant smile, tossing it into the trash bin at the end of the ward as she left. He spent the rest of the afternoon happily crunching numbers and wondering why the Globe would call one lonely nurse in the Pacific an angel.

He knew that this was a temporary assignment for her after some hospitalization of her own - she got tired easily and Hickman checked on her more than the others, keeping her shifts short. (He’d made an effort not to ask about it, when she sat down on his bed when she was doing her checks, if she paused and held the end of a bedstead to catch her breath. She was always polite with them, she was allowed some dignity of her own.) But she never said where she’d served, never talked about past assignments the way some of the others did, didn’t flash a boyfriend around like Calderon.

“Heard Conway talking about a party in town on Saturday,” he mentioned, one afternoon, just to make conversation. “You going out with ‘em?”

“You asking, Captain?” she responded with a smile, and for half a moment, he almost believed he had been. “I’m sure the red robe’s a great look where they’re going.” He allowed her his embarrassment, and her chuckle. “No, I’m not. No parties for me at the moment.”

Someone suddenly dropped a packing crate in the ward above them, and just as suddenly, she threw herself over his bed, as if she expected the ceiling to fall in and her body somehow be protection enough against the weight of an entire building. For a minute neither of them moved, breathing heavily against each other’s chests, and then she remembered where she was, getting up and straightening her dress and her cap, clearly embarrassed that this had been her response. “My apologies, Captain.”

There was a joke in it, somewhere, about her throwing herself at him, but he didn’t want to make it, and there were some things you just didn’t talk about in front of others - the Dear John letter, the enuresis, the drinking, the dreams. She’d thrown herself over him the way men under fire dived for foxholes and soldiers storming beaches ran for cover. There was a story there, and he wanted to know it, because if the roof really had caved in, no one should have been embarrassed about bravery like that.

They’d finally begun to let his leash out, letting him walk around the hospital twice a day with his IV pole. One more old man, shuffling around in his robe and slippers, pausing every fifty feet to catch his breath. And he’d dominated gridirons and taken airfields. But he was slowly gaining ground, the reach of his walk extending to the hospital courtyard where the nurses sometimes took their breaks. That was where he found her, sitting in the sunshine, her face tipped up towards the sky like she was waiting for a kiss.

(For half a moment he wanted to give it to her.)

He cleared his throat and let her recover herself. “This seat taken?” She shook her head and moved over on the bench and he sat down slowly, pausing to be mindful of his stitches for a moment. The sunshine was glorious. Hard to believe this was the same sun that had bleached their dungarees on the ‘Canal, that had beaten them senseless in the Palaus. Here it was softer, somehow, more welcoming. Or maybe that was the clean clothes talking. “No one learns to duck like that in a stateside hospital,” he observed mildly. She snorted, looked down at her hands, her silence all the answer he needed. “Pearl?” He asked, wondering if that’s where she’d learned to be afraid of bombings.

She shook her head and took a deep breath, still studying her hands as if she were heavily considering her options. When she spoke, she looked embarrassed again. “Malinta Tunnel.”

Malinta Tunnel! Suddenly a lot of things made sense, about the drawn look in her eyes, and the ability to get tired easily, the refusal to eat anything that wasn’t as plain as paste. She wasn’t on light duties because she wanted to be - Vivienne Arsenault’s war had looked a hell of a lot different than the one he’d imagined for her, and it had gone on for longer than his own. 

It was the first time in months where he’d felt like someone needed him. “You stayed.”

She nodded, her lips still drawn. “They asked for volunteers, when it was time to leave, but no one volunteers to - Well, you know. No one wants to admit they’re scared. We drew straws for the boat out, who would stay, who would go. When the bombing started, we did…all sorts of things. Rolled morphine syrettes into our hair, sewed scalpels and razorblades into the seams of our coveralls. We were ready to… kill ourselves, if it came to it.” She took a breath, in and out, closing her eyes a moment. “They all knew, the guys on the ward. When it felt like they were getting close, they gave us things - class rings, Christopher medals, lucky charms. They told us not to give them meds so others wouldn’t go without. Dying men, they - they told us to let them suffer. And when we moved out … we left them there.” Her breath was ragged, shoulders shaking and eyes wet. “I left them there and I still hear their voices in the dark.”

There wasn’t anything for it but to put an arm around her shoulders. He knew it was against regulations, but no one should have been ashamed of what they’d seen, least of all her and least of all that.

She sniffled and scrubbed her eyes. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this. I’m supposed to be the one in charge, the one who’s got it together. You’re alive, Viv, you stayed, you did your duty, for two more years in a filthy camp, you’re a hero for it. Sit down, have this chair, are you tired, Viv? Yes, I’m tired, and I’m tired of being tired and I’m angry that I can’t do more!” 

He hated himself for thinking this, but she was beautiful in her rage. She wasn’t an angel in hospital whites, she was a human, and in that moment than a dozen Red Cross hostesses put together didn’t have anything on her. He rubbed a hand across her back, the way he’d reassured dozens of soldiers, his own class ring catching slightly at the ridges of her undergarments. When there was no water, no food, and no rest, it was the one thing he could give his men - his reassurance, his steadiness, his calm. Here in Hawaii, it was the last thing he had left, and he gave it to her whole-heartedly. 

She was his mission now, both his soldier and the line, and he would watch her for as long as it took to win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m playing a little loose with the timeline here; Haldane was shot and killed in October of 1944; the camp was liberated in March of 1945.
> 
> Malinta Tunnel was part of the fortifications on the island of Corregidor. Before the battle for the island started in earnest, eight nurses were evacuated off the island, most for serious health conditions. The rest of the hospital staff stayed, eventually moving to San Tomas internment camp, where they waited out the rest of the war as POWs. The stage business Vivienne mentions here is all accurate.
> 
> For more information on The Angels of Bataan, I recommend Elizabeth Norman's We Band of Angels.


End file.
